The Dark Road - Hardcover

Jian, Ma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701187530 ISBN 13: 9780701187538

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2013

Synopsis

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life.

For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

About this title

Review:

"Unforgettable" (Stephen Abell Sunday Telegraph)

"The Dark Road follows the river-borne escape of fugitives from the one-child policy. An ill-matched couple’s flight along anarchic backwaters leads them into a raw, brutal, brilliantly depicted boom-time underworld" (Boyd Tonkin Independent)

"[Ma Jian’s] characterization is superb... A devastating critique of China’s oppressive communist regime" (Mail on Sunday)

"A writer of rare orgininality... All of Ma’s skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world" (Tash Aw Guardian)

"One of China’s most prominent dissident voices addresses the bleak effects of the one-child policy in this striking novel, in which the brutality of social engineering is made graphically plain. Ma Jian’s work is banned in China; this unflinching portrait of one woman’s struggle against oppression makes it sadly easy to understand why" (New Statesman)

Book Description:

'These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0701187530
• ISBN 13: 9780701187538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368